Afterthoughts : Desperate Martians now wooing Venusians

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The US: Losing in Iraq

The truth is that the US is losing the war in Iraq, both politically and militarily. The number of governments in the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" is now so reduced that the Pentagon has dropped the term and started using "multinational forces" instead. The 135,000 US troops are stretched thin, their numbers unable to stop the wildfire rise of a guerrilla insurgency. Estimates of many military experts of the minimum necessary number to fight the guerrillas to a stalemate range from 200,000 to a million. It is impossible to attain these numbers without provoking massive civil unrest in the US, where the majority of the population now sees the military intervention as unjustified. Mr. Bush may have won the elections but it was not because of public support for the war, and he knows this.

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The US Army, one must recall, fell apart internally at the last stages of the Vietnam War owing to demoralization, which took the form of, among other things, the "fragging" of officers, or throwing grenades at them. With about 40 per cent of the Army troops in Iraq being non-regular forces with the National Guard, who are not fulltime soldiers, the steady erosion of morale among US units must not be underestimated. Probably the only soldiers that can resist demoralization are the stupidly gung-ho Marines, but they are a minority in what is otherwise an Army show.

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• Latin America’s move to the Left will accelerate. The victory of the leftist coalition in Uruguay is simply the latest in a series of electoral victories for progressive forces, following those in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. Along with electoral turns to the left, there may also be in the offing more mass insurrections such as that which occurred in Bolivia in October 2003. Speaking of the turn towards the left and away from the empire, one of the US’ friends, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, assesses the situation accurately: "America’s friends are feeling the fire of this anti-American wrath. They are finding themselves forced to shift their own rhetoric and attitude in order to dampen their defense of policies viewed as pro-American or US-inspired, and to stiffen their resistance to Washington‚s demands and desires."

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What we are witnessing is the third major PR effort to convince the world that Iraq has been pacified. The first was the famous declaration of victory on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. We all know what happened afterwards. The second was the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people last June. A sharp escalation of the resistance followed that forgettable episode. Now, this effort to convince the world, relying on television images, that elections carried out under military occupation and amidst widespread resistance -- which were boycotted by millions of Iraqi voters were an exercise in "freedom" and "democracy." Wooing the Venusians

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